


the ever increasing list of things that are not going to be okay

by Tozette



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Horror Elements, M/M, Minor Character Death, Police Inspector Tesla, Serial Killer Nnoitra, There are rather a lot of content warnings inside, this relationship is awful enough that szayel ships it, whitechapel murders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 05:24:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11616789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Tesla is a stressed police inspector charged with solving a grim spate of murders. Dr Grantz is the presiding medical examiner and an enthusiastic criminal psychiatrist. Superintendent Cifer expects results and deals poorly with disappointment.The murdererreallywants Tesla to read his letters.





	the ever increasing list of things that are not going to be okay

**Author's Note:**

> Some warnings before we start. This is heavily based on the actual Whitechapel murders, although liberties have been taken. 
> 
> So you're going to see: occasional classism, very very brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it subtext about queerness being a mental disorder (no, you're not making it up if you catch it), shitty coping mechanisms interacting with equally shitty masculinity, pretty serious misogyny, very serious (although never approved by the narrative) violence against women in general and sex workers in specific, murder, mutilation, some light stalking, Nnoitra being an actual literal serial killer, mentions of cannibalism. I... think that's it.
> 
> This is less "psychopaths in love" and more "one psychopath might be in love, rip tesla's mental health". (Yes, rip is a pun.)

Tesla arrives early. He arrives early and leaves late a lot lately. It is a fortnight since his last meeting with the Superintendent and he has nothing to show for all his efforts.

Well. No. That’s not entirely accurate, but he certainly hasn’t magically produced a multiple murderer.

Superintendent Cifer is not sympathetic. He never is.

The police station is an old building in what’s now an unfashionable style: all careful symmetry, with large regular windows that allow adequate light and few flourishes. Tesla has seen the bones of the new building in Whitehall just off the river, all grey and red and white in dramatic stripes with its cast iron details and little pointed corner towers.

That strange, gothic monstrosity, he thinks, is where the superintendent is destined to work when Tesla is finally rid of him. In a way it suits him.

Cifer arrives with a newspaper and Tesla already knows what it’s going to be. He’s right, because there’s that cartoon, face up in front of him for the – oh, it must be the sixth – time this week. “Blind Man’s Buff”, the artist has titled it. It’s of a blindfolded officer staggering with his arms out while unkempt villains creep beneath his grasping hands.

It hits the battered wooden desk top with a loud noise in the muffled hush of Tesla’s sparse office. Cifer perches on his chair, stiff and straight and… tense.

Tesla’s a proper gentleman, when you get down to it. He’s shaven and groomed, neat but without vanity. His shoes are polished and his uniform’s always worn properly. He keeps meticulous records of investigation - he will never be one of those inspectors whose successors cannot find witness so-and-so because he failed to keep her name. He gives alms and uses no morphia or laudunum unless he’s sick, which happens rarely. He has no vices to speak of, is never the worse for drink and has no particular weakness for women. He is courteous to domestic servants and he’s polite and helpful to his neighbours, even though they make an indecent amount of noise at all hours.

He greatly admires reserve, dedication and propriety in others – so it’s very telling that he thinks Cifer could stand a little less of all three. The occasional hint of a human feeling would likely not bring the whole world crashing down around his ears.

Cifer never glares but his stare is heavy.

Tesla glances back at the paper on his desk. The blindfold makes it impossible to identify the incompetent police officer’s face, but the hair… looks an awful lot like Tesla’s.

He thinks maybe he’ll change the style.

…Maybe he’ll change his _name_. There’s a thought. They have to have police officers on the continent. Cifer looks like he’s never seen the sun in his life, so he probably won’t follow Tesla there. Or maybe India. India’s supposed to be warm…

It’s not just Cifer, of course. The cartoonist doesn’t know it, but he’s drawn exactly what it’s like to be working on the Whitechapel case.

“You will resolve this,” says Cifer. He gives the impression that he’s dipped into Tesla’s brain, plucked out all his uncharitable thoughts and found Tesla wanting.

“We’re doing our best, sir,” Tesla promises.

“It seems clear that that’s insufficient. More effort must be put forward, Inspector. Perhaps a greater number of patrols. I need not remind you that police grants are dependent upon efficiency?”

He wonders if Cifer has ever actually conducted an investigation before. These murders are not, as Cifer seems to hope, the kinds of crimes that may be simply and easily prevented by a few extra bobbies patrolling their beats at night.

To even begin to effect this suggestion, he’d have to flood Whitechapel with constables. Aside from the inability of the parish to pay them all, the character of a proper constable isn’t necessarily a common one among the working classes. Moreover, these murders want solving, not just preventing, and constables accustomed to patrolling the streets at a regulation two miles an hour are hardly equipped for investigation.

He takes a deep breath. “We’ve eliminated several–”

“Lindocruz.” Cifer is always cold and unsympathetic, so it’s not that easy to tell when he’s especially frosty. Except when he does _that_.

“Yes, sir,” he says. The sigh is internal.

He is clearly getting nowhere here, so he mostly just waits out the meeting so he can go back to work. Superintendent Cifer doesn’t have a lot to say – he is, along with being unsympathetic and unhelpful, also uncommunicative, which is in this case a blessing.

The rest of Tesla’s day is spent trying not to take his temper out on other people. The Sanderwicci murder isn’t giving them much, but every new scrap of information that comes in gets picked apart and dissected piece by piece.

She’s got a class and a location in common with Antenor and Aivirrne, but that’s not enough to be useful.

The missing uterus is fascinating to the criminal psychiatrist. Of course it is, how could it be otherwise? Dr Grantz’s only disappointment in the whole case appears to be that there is as yet no evidence that their killer is actually availing himself of the professional services of any of his victims before he kills them. It seems the only hole in his theory.

Already today he has spent thirty minutes ranting to Tesla about the murderer’s relationship with his mother and the ‘plain sexuality of the wounds as an act of violent penetration’. Tesla’s cast iron composure only seems to spur his commentary to greater and more fevered heights of excitement.

Tesla’s sure the good doctor is right – or, well, he thinks it’s politic to seem sure, anyway – and that it’s all very fascinating. Perhaps some lucky constable will come to witness this psychopath explaining in detail that he has a fixation on women’s reproductive organs for reasons of his psychiatric disorder, and _oh, how he enjoys cutting them out!_ and then that information will actually be relevant or helpful.

(This thought will seem brutally ironic by sunup. But for now, Tesla is righteously annoyed by the waste of time and resources.)

“I don’t suppose you’ve an idea what trade he might be in?” The preceding medical examiner on this case had suggested the man might be a surgeon. This theory has met with disdain from Grantz – disdain of such a type and duration and volume that Tesla does not intend to bring the possibility up directly ever again.

“Given the timing of the deaths I would say he has a regular job, clearly a sunup to sundown sort of occupation,“ Grantz says, which is – that’s actually quite good, that’s useful. "Nobody can tell a man’s trade from these stab wounds.” He sounds like he’s daring anyone to contradict him. Nobody does.

Of course not.

Probably nobody wants to argue because they prefer not to spend any more time with him than they have to. The doctor is brilliant, but… Tesla’s not so sure Dr Grantz is really qualified to be diagnosing _other people_ , exactly.

The day wears on. It feels longer than it is, and it’s longer than most.

Tesla steps outside the building in the dark. Another late night. He’s missed sunrise and he’s missed sunset, busy going through all the statements he’s gotten collected from… anyone who ever knew the Sanderwicci girl, seems like. They’re basically doorknocking now.

He waves to the constable who’ll be taking the night patrol along Leman, then takes another two steps and is abruptly yanked into a cramped, dark alley.

It smells like piss and old fish, and there’s no light - just big, icy hands in the dark.

Something slams into his belly, then his head when he curls forward with a breathless wheeze. The next thing Tesla knows, he’s shoved against the grimy stone wall with the weight of another person’s body keeping him pinned. There’s pressure in his lower back, something, a knee in his spine – and that seems strange to him, enough he notices it even through the panic.

Tesla is not small. He is a fit and nourished man, above average in height and muscle. The man behind him – and it must be a man, or else a giantess – handles him the same way Tesla might handle an annoyed cat.

He must be – at least six and a half feet.

Tesla opens his mouth to cry out. The patrol is not that far. With the two officers it surely won’t matter how big the man is.

A hand releases his skull, muffles him, hard and fast over his mouth, caught between his face and the wall. It is a big hand, with fingers that are long and sickly cold.

There’s a breath on Tesla’s neck. “Don’t.”

Don’t. He stills. The hand on his mouth flexes.

…There’s a quiet tapping sound. It seems loud in the dark. It takes Tesla a second to pick the sensation out of the sudden press of someone else’s bulk and the grimy wall and the knee pinning him. His eyes are adjusting to the dimness, and the tapping times with the gleam of something silvery.

It’s the flat of a knife. _Tap, tap_ gently on the insignia of Tesla’s coat. That’s close enough to his throat for the threat to be very clear.

The blade is about eight inches along. It looks sharp.

Tesla’s heart jerks to a stop.

He’s seen exactly what kind of work a knife like that can do. He’s seen it on bodies, in mortuary photos. He’s seen –

His heart, that unreliable, unreasonable thing, makes up for lost time, pounding away until he can feel it in his jaw and in his throat. His mouth tastes of metal.

“I don’t like to kill men,” says the voice behind him, with a rush of warm breath down his collar. It only confirms what Tesla already knows. “But I could do you.”

Tesla swallows. The man behind him targets exclusively prostitutes. What it means that he’s willing to make this exception for Tesla is… A new, insidious fear makes itself known, bubbling hot in his belly.

That big hand over his mouth warms rapidly with Tesla’s increasingly fast breath and becomes clammy. The body behind him shivers.

 _Tap tap_ goes the knife, soft but deafening in the quiet. And Tesla’s pulse hammers against his skin like it’s trapped and it desperately wants out.

“You’ve been following my work?” he asks, and –

–Tesla’s not sure what he expects, but it’s not that. The man’s got an accent, although he can’t quite place it.

“‘Leather apron’ was cute, was that you? And they’re saying I’m a doctor in the paper now–” There’s a laugh, and it’s a bit louder than the rough whisper. The tone is savage and raucous, but the voice is shockingly normal.

“I was gonna ask,” says the voice, and the pressure of his knee abruptly increases until Tesla can feel the bones in his hips grinding against the wall, “because you haven’t answered any of my letters.”

Letters? Tesla blinks. _Letters_.

The knife slides, with a horrific grating sound, into the grout between bricks, much too close to Tesla’s face. Half an inch would see it cutting into his cheek. It goes in easily and he can feel the force in the big man’s body, the heave of muscle in his chest against Tesla’s shoulder.

Well. The Yard already knows he’s strong. A man has to be strong to get all the way through the trachea and clean through bone. Tesla just never considered that he might be stronger than even that before this very second. It feels like a long second.

The hand on his face slides away. The fingers drag on his lips, catching with their dry edges. They curl instead around the back of his neck.

Tesla is very aware that this man could snap his neck like a bunny’s. His hand is cold, damp from Tesla’s breath. His neck feels… quite bare.

The ball of his thumb begins rubbing in circles, just over the big thumping pulse in his neck. The man’s hands are rough. Tesla feels it all the way down his spine, like electricity rushing to ground.

“We’ve got – scores of letters,” Tesla says flatly. He’s always had a good poker face but even he’s astonished at how evenly his voice comes out. “Hoaxes. Journalists.”

“Journalists,” the voice in the dark repeats. There’s a humming noise, contemplative.

Then the hand on his neck tenses, the body shifts, and the knife comes out of the wall with one short yank. Its sharp edge slices a long bloody line on Tesla’s cheek. It stings like a burn. He flinches, but the hand on his neck holds him steady.

“That’s easy fixed,” he murmurs finally. “I’ll make sure you know it’s me.”

 _Or_ , thinks Tesla a bit wildly, _you could just stop butchering whores_. He does not say it. The knife is sharp and the man’s monstrously strong, and clearly not playing with anything like a full deck.

He yanks Tesla away from the wall and wraps one long, impossibly strong arm around him, crushing him against the front of his body. He flips the knife between his fingers. “I’m not a doctor, though,” he says, which is an abrupt change of topic.

As for the topic itself, Tesla knows this – or, well, he’d thought he’d known it, anyway, but it’s nice to get it confirmed. As far as the Yard’s experts are concerned, the murderer isn’t even a man of the kind of technical skill one sees in butchers. Grantz’ll be pleased.

The flat of the gleaming knife taps gently on Tesla’s throat.

He might not be an anatomical expert, but Tesla knows he has no trouble at all finding the carotid.

“Um,” he says, and hopes it sounds interested or submissive or whatever it is that the lunatic wants. He looks at the arm, hoping to pick out at least a skin tone, but in the dimness all he can tell is that their murderer is currently wearing some pale shade. His boots are black – pointed, though. That’s not fashionable, not common. Tall man, pointed boots, very strong – that’s. Something.

“Are you married, Chief Inspector Tesla Lindocruz?” He drawls out Tesla’s whole name like it’s something faintly obscene that he really enjoys saying.

The thought _am I what now?_ wars with _he knows my name_? and they come out tied and muddled.

“No,” says Tesla, and he has been neutral about that fact for years now but suddenly he’s intensely, immensely grateful to have no such attachments.

“Nice.”

Is it? Tesla shudders. That’s unsettling.

And then:

“Hey, let me show you,” says that voice, and that’s so much worse.

He peels away Tesla’s shirt. He spends the next twenty minutes – twenty nightmarish minutes of Tesla’s life that he’s never, ever getting back – demonstrating with his cold fingers against Tesla’s skin where, on a woman, he’d cut to lift out the womb and the kidneys, the liver.

“That’s. Very enlightening,” Tesla says, when he’s prompted. It is, too, and Tesla is sort of looking forward to sharing the information with his colleagues and also looking forward to never contemplating it again.

The killer says he’s met an American who collects and preserves wombs, once. He likes to hear himself talk, Tesla thinks. His hands have gone still, but he won’t let go of Tesla’s hip. His thumb rubs circles and the knife is still steady.

“Viscera,” Tesla tries awkwardly. His voice is steady and his hands are shaking. He is sweating through his clothes. He can’t stop shuddering. It’s like he’s cold, but he can’t even feel the chill in the air. “Yes.”

Are they going to do this until dawn and daylight chase away his cover? Dawn is a long way away. Hours.

He’s going to feel those gentle fingers drawing lines across his abdomen in his sleep forever. He knows it.

“They’re good,” the man says dreamily. His thumb is still rubbing maddening little circles on Tesla’s hip. All Tesla can think is about the _plain sexuality of the wounds as an act of violent penetration_. If Tesla survives until morning he’s going to fire Grantz. If he’s even allowed. “Nice.”

Or maybe they won’t wait until dawn. Maybe this man really will just kill Tesla and leave him in the alley for a tramp to find – he has no womb to steal, but he has kidneys and a liver and a lot of soft fleshy places he’d rather not feel that knife.

But then, bafflingly, Tesla is thrown out of the alley with enough force to send him sprawling in the street.

There’s the sharp _click click click_ of heeled boots, and by the time Tesla gets his bearings and rolls over, the man is gone.

He gets to his feet and rolls his shoulder. His cheek stings and his spine is bruised where that lunatic ground his knee in. His clothes are disarrayed. He can still feel the knife on his neck. The skin over his hip tingles and itches. It must be a purely imaginary response.

Tesla doesn’t think to call the patrolman now. He walks home with the nagging fear of someone waiting around every corner. The shapes and shadows of moving pedestrians make him flinch. None of them is tall enough. Not one.

His house is cold and quiet – and dark. He hesitates, wondering if someone’s going to be waiting for him. Surely not. Surely if he was going to murder Tesla he’d have done it out in the street, with nothing to make it seem any more personal than any of his other murders – he hasn’t followed any of the women back home. It’s not his mode of operation.

 _Neither are men,_ Tesla thinks. He isn’t sure if this thought is meant to be comforting or ominous. He grinds his teeth, pushes the door open and resolutely marches inside.

Nothing waits for him in the dark.

He sleeps with the lamp on, even though the gas gives him a headache after a few hours.

Nothing waits for him the next night, either. Or the next. There’s another three letters at the station, forwarded by a frightened journalist covering the murders, but Tesla doesn’t think any of them is from the killer. He thinks he has a feel for him, and this – no, it isn’t quite right.

Dr Grantz leaps upon them, hoping to add something meaningful to his profile, and Tesla is surprised when he, too, decides they’re fakes.

He reports his interaction with the killer and adds it to their records. He is meticulous and accurate to a degree that’s unflattering, but his ego won’t be the reason this investigation fails.

Cifer is unsympathetic. And... Dr Grantz is a little _too_ sympathetic.

Tesla makes an effort to leave before dark now, or else to walk with the patrolman half way home, until their beat diverges from his way.

He knows intellectually that his killer could be lurking anywhere, but he has developed an irrational fear of the one alley in particular. His home feels more or less normal again – he’s never been attacked here, after all, and he locks up well and there’s no indication that the killer has any idea where he lives. His fear that first night was – cowardice, mostly. He quashes it ruthlessly.

There are two more murders, both in one night. The first seems like a rush job – a cut throat and little else. Tesla is pathetically grateful right up until the second murder is discovered less than an hour later. It is enough of a mess to make up for it: entrails flung over her shoulders, organs missing. The kidneys are gone, and most of the womb.

Tesla cannot avoid at least seeing the crime scene photographs.

He finds he also cannot help but trace the lines across his gut, exactly as the killer did that night in the alley. He closes his eyes and can almost believe it’s not his hand.

The sensation sends a shudder through him. He opens his eyes again and clasps his hands tightly behind his back.

The photographs are still there, though. Without thinking, Tesla rubs his thumb across the cut on his cheek. It turned out deeper than he thought. It will scar.

One girl’s face is mutilated.

“Five minutes,” says Dr Grantz firmly, when Tesla forces himself to go down to the mortuary.

He may a psychiatrist by profession, but he is a medical doctor. Tesla wants somebody familiar with the killings. Grantz looks at the bodies like they’re telling a story, like they’re strange and fascinating works of art and not human remains.

Tesla makes himself look at them and discuss it in person. He must. He rubs his cut cheek and examines the stiff limbs and slack mouths of the victims. Grantz says they’re both alcoholics and prostitutes, and seems increasingly, personally annoyed at there being no evidence of sexual intercourse between murderer and victims. Tesla will admit that this is puzzling, but it is not disappointing.

“Perhaps five minutes,“ he corrects himself, using some metal instrument to probe the cavity where one of the girls’ organs are missing. “Certainly not more than ten. He’s left part of the womb… Hmm, poor thing,” he adds with astonishing sincerity. “He must be disappointed.”

Tesla ignores this. “You’re sure?”

He sniffs. He’s sure.

Tesla finds it strange that the murderer has likely spent more time with him than he has with some of the people he’s killed.

Killing like this… it's intimate. It’s horribly, frighteningly intimate. He wonders at doing it to someone you barely know.

Then again, Tesla’s continued failure to close this case really just proves how little he understands serial killers. He’s never considered it a character flaw before.

Despite all the stress and anxiety, Tesla sleeps surprisingly well. Long hours of challenging work will do that to a body.

He wakes up a couple of times the next night, though – he hears things clattering outside, loud voices. He blinks awake, wonders what on earth his neighbours are doing, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Later, it is the thump of a drunk outside his door. And then the creak of his floor.

He wakes. The creak is soft, and he tenses under the covers but resolutely doesn’t crack his eyes open. He knows it is only the house settling in the cool dark. Tesla is a grown man. This unsettled feeling is irrational. It is humiliating to fear familiar noises in the dark. It will pass.

Tesla goes back to sleep.

He barely remembers it when he gets up, but there's a glass and a bottle left on his table. The glass is upturned, empty, and there’s a tiny puddle of brandy on the wooden table top. He can smell it. Tesla frowns and thinks _Odd, I’m sure I didn’t leave that out last night–_

Then his eyes fall upon a scrap of paper, trapped beneath the rim of the glass.

 _Tesla,_ it reads, in a strange and jagged hand. Apparently they’re on first name terms. The ink is smeared where the brandy has spilt.

Tesla swallows. He’s never woken up so fast in his life.

_You talk in your sleep. Did you know?_

Tesla feels a rush of – something, some unidentifiable feeling, or maybe just _his soul fleeing his body_ – wash over him, so fast and overwhelming that his knees threaten to unhinge. He fumbles for the back of the chair and uses it to brace himself up.

_I left something nice at the station for you._

_Yours_.

And there’s nothing else.

Tesla spends the next hour searching his house in a blind panic, and then he goes to the station in a state only marginally less agitated. He is relieved and, perversely, upset to find nothing there amiss.

“Fascinating,” says Dr Grantz, adjusting his spectacles. “I believe he’s developed a fixation.”

He licks his lips. Pauses. An idea seems to occur to him then, flickering brightly behind his shadowed eyes.

“Ah," he says, in a tone of discovery. "I knew it was strange he wasn’t copulating with any of the victims–”

And then he stops mid-sentence, eyes Tesla for a second and wanders off, talking more to himself than anyone.

Later he offers Tesla a copy of a reference text called _Psychopathia Sexualis_ with wide yellow eyes and shaky hands. Tesla does not believe he is nervous, exactly.

Tesla declines. He wonders if Dr Grantz is aware that other people, including, say, possibly Tesla, are actually sentient and not just constructs of his own imagination. (He chooses not to ask because it turns out, on reflection, that he doesn’t want the answer.)

“You’ve no idea, then?” he prompts, trying to redirect Grantz’s attention back to the matter at hand.

“No. We shall have to wait and see.” He sounds much too excited about the prospect.

Tesla repairs to his own office to torment himself with what information they do have. No new ideas come to him. No inspiration strikes.

He’s distracted.

Is he to wait, then, in this seething anticipation and anxiety, for the other shoe to drop?

He is unsurprised to discover that he no longer sleeps soundly. In fact, Tesla thinks he will be surprised if he ever sleeps again.

The next morning he staggers in late after a sleepless night. Grantz is waiting for him, wild-eyed and unusually unkempt and practically vibrating. It seems ominous.

“I found it!” he cries with a kind of febrile excitement, and he passes Tesla a newspaper.

Tesla doesn’t have time to brace himself.

 _ **Whitehall Mystery!**_ screams the headline.

The article reveals that somebody snuck into the new police station they’re building and left a body in the basement.

Most of a body.

It’s a torso. Whoever left it – and Tesla knows who, doesn’t he, even if it doesn’t match the man’s usual method at all – has cut off its head and its legs and arms and left it there right under the noses of the police – and then, Tesla thinks, he must have walked off, broken in to Tesla’s house and – left his note. Had a drink. Watched Tesla sleep with blood still on his outmoded, pointed boots.

Unlike the rest of his victims, the examining doctor finds no evidence the killer started with the cut to her neck.

Tesla’s stomach does a queasy flip.

There are no photographs of it in the paper and it is out of Tesla’s jurisdiction. He takes the time to visit, hands over his note, makes a statement.

They ask him to identify the body and even though the only women Tesla even knows are the laundress and the lady who makes pies down the way, he can’t turn them down. He feels somehow complicit.

He cannot identify her. He doubts he could, even if they had her face to show him, but he certainly can’t just from the stiff tissues that lay on their table there.

Tesla leaves while the other officer is still looking at him with some sympathy.

Two weeks later he must ask for the note back, because he comes to work and discovers a letter left for him there. It comes via the head of the neighbourhood vigilance committee and arrives in a box with half a… lord, something. It is dark, dense, fleshy. It reeks of spirits of wine.

Tesla would like to think it belongs to an animal, but the jagged hand that wrote the letter is naggingly familiar and there is a fine line between optimism and delusion.

It does not belong to an animal.

“Well,” says Dr Grantz, “it’s the left side, where the cut was made, and certainly belongs to a woman and an alcoholic–”

“It was preserved in spirits,” Tesla points out mildly.

“I didn’t test by sniffing for ethanol, Inspector,” drawls the doctor, singularly patronising. “It is a small point, but perhaps we might leave the medical examination to one who knows what he’s talking about?”

Tesla, duly chastened, lets him continue uninterrupted.

“It’s impossible to tell for certain, of course – it could be the missing left kidney of some other poor alcoholic woman,” he shrugs. He cleans the remains from his hands with surgical spirit and fire, and it throws an ugly light on his face and gleams in his glasses. “I doubt it, though.”

The handwriting is identical, when he views the letter next to his note. The writer calls the committee head “Mister” and “sir”, and perhaps that’s mocking, but –

But the note on the kitchen table just says “Tesla”.

Tesla isn’t sure what to make of it. He doesn’t draw attention to it, and if anybody else notices, they say nothing.

“I doubt he’s educated enough to understand how vile and unsanitary it is to consume human organs,” is all Dr Grantz says with his nose in the air. His eyes linger upon certain misspellings longer than others, but if he has any clever theories he’s keeping them to himself for now. He taps his fingers on the postmark. “He could catch anything.”

Tesla would like to think that part of the letter is just a strategy employed for intimidation – surely, surely, nobody cuts the organs from a person and takes them home and _eats them_ – but when he thinks about it he can almost hear that voice whispering, hoarse and dreamy. He would like to think it’s a lie, but he doesn’t.

They have relative peace for almost a month, punctuated only by frequent, icy visits from Superintendent Cifer and more fake letters from the killer.

They get plenty of the letters. Tesla has read over the ones he knows are real again and again for comparison. He can recite them from memory and trace their characters with his fingers. Dr Grantz has his theories – the letters give him an idea as to the man’s education, and he narrows down his circumstances carefully. A man with a day job, who works regular hours. A man with limited literacy. A man with a specific accent. The newspaper still claims he’s a doctor and Grantz says they’re feeding on public distrust of a noble and misunderstood profession, but then Grantz would say that, wouldn't he?

November brings a new body, and this is…

Tesla recalls, distantly and with an icy rush of horror and bile and something that stings his throat, that he was once comforted that the murderer never comes to the women’s homes. Briefly, that idea made him feel safer in his own house –

That seems like a stupid and dangerous comfort now. Of course he’s not limited to public spaces – he’s a man, not some nursery boggle. He can enter homes uninvited and cross running water. He isn’t beholden to arbitrary comforting rules.

Privacy just gives him more time to ...to play.

The victim is a girl named Odelschwanck, but they cannot know that for hours and hours after they find her because she is strewn in pieces halfway across her own bedroom and it is not possible to tell.

There are more parts missing than present. In the end the officers on the scene find most of her, but they never do determine what became of her heart. Tesla thinks of preserved kidneys and unsanitary practices and he thinks --

He thinks he knows what happens to the heart, where it's gone and why they'll never find it, but it helps nobody to put forward that suggestion – least of all him. He is trying not to contemplate it.

Dr Grantz, of course, makes the suggestion within about thirty seconds of being let at the remains. He’s a sick, morbid bastard, but he’s not stupid.

A friend eventually gives them a positive identification using what remains of the tattoo on her back.

Tesla hasn’t slept well in a month, but now he wakes at the slightest provocation. He listens to every creak and sound, sitting hunched and wary in his bedclothes like a toddler afraid of the dark. There’s a knife beneath his pillow, long and sharp, and sometimes he cuts himself on it when he clings in his sleep.

“This is a nervous disorder you're developing," Grantz tells him, although Tesla very much does not ask. He says it idly, but he’s in Tesla’s office doorway at eleven in the morning.

“Is it,” says Tesla flatly. He is going over the letters again. He knows the recent ones are all fake, all hoaxes perpetrated by journalists hoping to prolong the hysteria in the absence of a fresh body – and he also can’t help himself. _What if_ hums in his blood and echoes in his ribs. The cut on his face is a pale scar now. He rubs it often. 

“Indeed,” Grantz concurs, and although Tesla feels it is obvious that his response was no invitation he comes in and closes the door behind him. He puts his hand flat on the table, right on top of the letters. “It’s common in those suffering a shock, if they’ve the predilection for dwelling on it.”

And also in bored housewives, but Tesla can appreciate that Grantz is making a sincere effort to be tactful, even if he’s also trying to tell Tesla he’s a lunatic. The two don't marry well.

Grantz slides the letters out from under Tesla’s gaze and takes command of them.

“Look at another case,” he says, “and go home and drink three glasses of wine before bed. Stop thinking about it for thirty minutes all together. You may have these back in the morning.”

This is directly opposed to the instructions Cifer had this morning and Tesla says as much.

“Superintendent Cifer is an utter _bore_ ,” Grantz tells him scathingly, “and, importantly, not your physician.”

So Tesla lets himself be bullied into going home, but his house is dark and ominous and he cannot bring himself to try to sleep there.

He understands the doctor’s advice. He can’t seem to take it.

Before Christmas, Grantz personally escorts him to the apothecary and writes out a prescription for choral hydrate right on the spot. It’s the closet Dr Grantz has ever come to interpersonal concern as far as Tesla is aware - and it makes sense it would be for Tesla, because no other inspector is likely to put up with his nuisance. Tesla is unable to leave the shop without this medicine, despite his efforts.

Dr Grantz cannot make him take it, of course, and in any case he swiftly loses interest in Tesla’s defective nerves anyway, distracted by his next, more interesting, project.

Tesla keeps his job by the skin of his teeth that year – and likely because nobody else will have it for love or money. It certainly isn’t because he’s competent or successful.

January comes, and with it no new body – oh, there are murders, and certainly Whitechapel sees several. It’s a poor area, full of migrants and criminals, so vagrants freeze. Men beat their wives to death and manufacture all sorts of excuses. Robberies and drunken brawls go wrong. Locals ignore screams of “murder!” simply because they are too common in the area. But the body Tesla has been bracing for, the one he cannot help but feel everyone has been bracing for, doesn’t come.

He wonders if perhaps they have not found it, but he’s certain that the killer would let them know. If it was hidden by snow or circumstance, he believes there would be a letter or a message of some kind – maybe a breadcrumb trail of those macarbe trophies.

There’s nothing.

Nothing in February, either, no real correspondence and no grizzly scenes. He begins to wonder, with mixed feelings, if the killer hasn’t left. Or… or died, perhaps. Maybe he’s been picked up for something unrelated and relegated to an insane asylum or a prison.

There are several other cases that come and go, and even one where he catches a man who has killed two – so it is not that he’s fundamentally incapable of finding a multiple murderer, whatever Cifer's cold eyes might imply. It’s simply this specific murderer that Tesla cannot handle.

It would be a good thing if he were locked away. Tesla knows this. If he cannot be hanged, a prison or institution would be the best place for a man like that. And he is still oddly disappointed - there is a question mark hovering over the whole case, and Tesla has no way of resolving anything about it without a murderer.

His sleep patterns begin to recover over time, although he still wakes in a lather and sometimes, when he’s half way to sleep, imagines the tread of pointed boots on his wooden floors. Dr Grantz remarks on his apparent recovery with his usual tact. It isn’t as simple as that of course, and Tesla chooses not to tell him about the bad nights.

August comes again before he knows it, and then September. Despite his marked lack of success, Tesla finds that the pressure of the murders is significantly reduced. The press is concerned with scarlet fever again and that’s not a problem for the Yard. Cifer is no better tempered, but Tesla sees less of him.

Mid-September sees Tesla opening his mail, absently noticing the stained and cheap envelope at the bottom of the pile. When he gets to it, something about the hand makes his whole body light up with anxiety. It is a sunny day outside but a chill sweeps over him like he’s been plunged into shadow.

_Tesla –_

_Never seen an anniversary before. It’s Pinchin St. I’ll let you keep all the good bits this time._

_Yours._

Tesla puts the letter down and sinks slowly into his seat. Its foot scrapes loudly on the floor. He is adrift in conflicting thoughts and desires. He’s confused, afraid, angry.

 _Mine_ , he thinks uncertainly, tasting the word in his mind. 

Pinchin Street is a disaster.

They never do find her head.

**Author's Note:**

> If you finished this and said "toz what the fuck" then I'm sorry because I don't know what the fuck either.
> 
> Um... if you liked something about this fic, let me know what it was in a comment. Otherwise I am going to bed and I hope you, too, sleep... really well ... tonight?


End file.
